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Feed for BeWelcome BlogsPress Release by planetcruiserIMMEDIATE RELEASE
BeWelcome switches to OpenStreetMap
20 December 2012, Rennes, France - On Friday, 14 December, worldwide hospitality exchange network BeWelcome released a major update to their website www.bewelcome.org, dropping Google Maps as default map provider in favor of free and open source OpenStreetMap.
BeWelcome decided to make the switch because thanks to thousands of individual contributors OpenStreetMap mapping material has greatly improved over the last years, and because implementation through third party services has become painless.
With this step volunteer-run BeWelcome also underlines its strong non-profit values - in a time where internet-based "peer-to-peer hospitality" communities are subject to increasing commercialization by venture capitalists.
Why OpenStreetMap?
When BeWelcome was launched in 2007 all mapping features were implemented using Google Maps, the only free up-to-date maps with search and embedding capabilities available back then. Over time, and also with contributions by BeWelcome members themselves, the free alternative OpenStreetMap (OSM) matured and other websites switched over from proprietary services. In some parts of Russia or Bosnia for example OSM even offers more detailed maps than commercial alternatives.
So when BeWelcome was approached by an OSM spokesperson in Germany earlier this year, the topic was discussed in the community and the switch was made a priority, additionally fueled by the fact that Google introduced a pricing model and ads for its maps service.
A few weeks later one BeWelcome software developer presented an almost complete integration of OSM based on the free Cloudmade/Leaflet API. His work was then extended by a team, recently included in the main development environment and finally launched to the live website.
Quotes
"With the switch we are getting closer to becoming completely independent from using commercial services. I am convinced that our users will appreciate our commitment to privacy and non-profit projects." says founding member and active volunteer Matthias Hess.
Meinhard Benn, technical coordinator and programmer at BeWelcome notes: "OpenStreetMap is all about people and their passion for sharing, just like us. So it's a perfect match." He adds: "Google Maps will remain an optional layer for the time being, but depending on user feedback we will either ditch it completely or at least allow users to choose alternative commercial map providers to have less of a mono-culture."
Frank Van Den Block, chairman of BeWelcome's legal body BeVolunteer confirms: "The switch to OSM is a logical next step in the evolution of BeWelcome. Nothing beats a map created by thousands of individuals and constantly updated by dedicated volunteers. Open Source means freedom, and that is something we can never have enough of."
Links and contact
BeWelcome website: www.bewelcome.org Map example: www.bewelcome.org/searchmembers Screenshot: downloads.bewelcome.org/media/osm-screenshot.png BeWelcome media inquiries: media@bewelcome.org
About BeWelcome
BeWelcome is a hospitality exchange network - a worldwide community that lets you share your home or a place to stay for a few nights, make new friends from different cultures and help others on their way. In contrast to similar commercial networks, BeWelcome is a registered non-profit that places value on open source and contributions made by their members. BeWelcome has created a legal and organizational framework which ensures that it will always remain non-profit, open and free. Every member is encouraged to help guide the community, participate in core decision-making and contribute to the development of the website.
Thanks to the hard work of an expanding team of contributors, BeWelcome has grown from a small project with a handful of members in 2007 into a vibrant and enthusiastic community. Its membership base has more than doubled in 2012, now comprising 30,000 registered hosts and travelers. It is an organic self-managed organization without the need for investors, stockholders or venture capital. Everyone passionate about alternative travel, cultural exchange, making new friends, and sharing experiences with like-minded people in every corner of the world will feel right at home in the BeWelcome community. BeWelcome plans to continuously improve its service and innovate new ways of serving its cause.
About OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Two major driving forces behind the establishment and growth of OSM have been restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices.
Founded by Steve Coast in 2004, it was inspired by the success of Wikipedia and preponderance of proprietary map data in the UK and elsewhere. Since then, it has grown to over 900,000 contributors, who collect data with GPS devices, aerial photography, and other free sources. This crowdsourced data is then made available under the Open Database License. The site is supported by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, a non-profit organization registered in England. (Source: Wikipedia)BeWelcomeThu, 20 Dec 2012 05:13:46 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1568http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1568
planetcruiserSwitch to OpenStreetMap and bug fixes released by planetcruiserHello everyone,
it has long been in the making, a bit more than two months, but we hope this was worth the wait:
Complete overhaul of all maps - we are now using free and open source OpenStreetMap as our default map, with the option to switch back to a Google Maps view
Many, many bug fixes in map and city searches along the way
Group membership management improvements
There are a few more smaller changes and improvements. Read more details in the complete changelog, if you are interested.
With this release we are taking another step towards supporting the non-profit world by including work from other volunteer-run projects into our site. We feel this is worth a press release, which will be sent out shortly. Stay tuned.
Thanks fly out to abyssin, beatnickgr, crumbking, lantti, James_Oder_Dave, jsfan, mahoun200000, matthias, midsch, pablobd, sanderr, shevek and toub for making this release possible by testing, commenting and contributing code. We would also like to thank Cloudmade for supplying their fantastic free API service to embed OpenStreetMap material into any website.
Let us know what you think about these changes in the comments below!
May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)BeWelcomeSat, 15 Dec 2012 18:15:16 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1564http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1564
planetcruiserSeoul by planetcruiserBeWelcomeSat, 27 Oct 2012 19:44:45 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1482http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1482
planetcruiserMoscow by planetcruiserThis is my first time in Russia! Curious..BeWelcomeFri, 26 Oct 2012 08:06:19 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1179http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1179
planetcruiserFixes released by planetcruiserHello everyone,
February has been a pretty quiet month for the BeWelcome "devs". No major spamming, no major technical development. ;) So also this release is a pretty small one with four issues solved:
Fixed display of country and region for members in some exotic places
Fixed blog comment counters to only count active members (not spammers)
Changed donation page to display donations for the whole year instead of the current quarter only
Changed member banning behaviour to log out currently logged in banned members (stops a spammer right after being discovered)
See the changelog for some technical background.
As a sidenote, Pedalr has started two new groups Bugs and Feature Requests and gave us lots of feedback there already. Feel free to join him!
May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)
BeWelcomeWed, 07 Mar 2012 20:06:46 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1117http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1117
planetcruiserLots of fixes, and a spammer by planetcruiserHi everyone,
this release cycle was somewhat shaken by two events: First the database had some inconsistencies in geographical data and then we had a single spammer sending thousands of messages and more than a hundred profile comments within hours after sign-up.
This led to the following changes which were released last night:
Added tight limit on number of messages a new member can send (5 per hour, 15 per day) - this limit is temporary and will be lifted as soon as better logic is in place, see below
Removed display of banned members in various lists and counters
Fixed various features related to counting and displaying members in geographical regions (mainly in Browse countries section)
More countries in the countries list - yay!
See the complete changelog for 8 more changes and technical details.
We are sorry if the spam attack mentioned above bothered you, and we hope that you will bare with us and help us to protect our community from this kind of abuse by reporting it as soon as you spot it.
Giving the users the much asked for possibility to send messages right after sign-up comes with a trade-off, we learned this the hard way now. But better ways of marking and automatically detecting spam are on their way. Sniff around the next release milestone to find out more.
Thanks to coroa, matthias and lupochen for contributing code to this release.
May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)BeWelcomeTue, 31 Jan 2012 16:45:53 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1076http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1076
planetcruiserEven more fixes and improvements released by planetcruiserFirst of all, a happy Gregorian new year to you! :)
Yes, it's a Monday, and yes, we have just released some BeWelcome goodness. The most important changes:
See comment replies on profile comments pages
Added Delete and Spam button when reading a message
Fixed a bug that hid dozens of new members in the member approval tool
No more captcha for new members when sending messages, we will add other ways of preventing message abuse soon
Fixed more bugs in the address update form
See 8 more changes and more technical details in the complete changelog of this release.
By the way, we are always happy about people that would like to join us in getting our hands dirty while plumbing our software. We have fixed a lot of things that were broken since a while, but there is still plenty to do. Send me a message or write to the developer mailing list if you are interested to help.
Thanks to bikepunk, confoodle, coroa, crumbking, matthias, lupochen and pablobd for contributing to this release and to everyone else for participating in creating a better BeWelcome, one bug at a time. ;)
May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)BeWelcomeMon, 09 Jan 2012 21:46:36 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1054http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1054
planetcruiserFixes and improvements released by planetcruiserGood news, it's Release Monday! I'm happy to announce that we just pushed out an update to the site. Here is what's new today:
Profile page:
Increased profile picture size and added zoom - on popular demand, yeah!
Fixed "Show all pictures" link in latest pictures box
Fixed bug causing age being hidden for all users
Your personal welcome page (after login):
Added user picture thumbnail at top left to encourage people to upload their photo
Added RSS feed icon and links to comments for community news entries
Removed headlines "What's the news?", "Who is who?" and "What's hot?" for cleaner layout
Other:
Workaround for Chrome/Chromium bug on invite members result page
Changed link for bug report at bottom of page
Fixed and cleaned various bits of framework code
Also again this time, check the changelog if you are interested in the technical details behind these improvements.
This was the second release since the major clean-up I mentioned in my last announcement. A process is slowly shaping up and more contributors joined. A bit of time has passed since the last release, but let's not forget that we had to prepare a General Assembly of our organisation in the meantime. Also I personally was on a road for a bit..
So, be very welcome and keep on suggesting improvements and reporting bugs please.
May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)
BeWelcomeMon, 28 Nov 2011 20:29:08 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1029http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1029
planetcruiserFixes released by planetcruiserI'm proud to announce that I just made some changes to the BeWelcome site by our phantastic software development team available to the public. Here is what changed with today's release:
Removed checkboxes for "Accept spam policy" and "Attach profile picture" from message sending dialogue
Added link to group at the top of group forum post
Fixed extra empty lines appearing when editing forum posts
Fixed developer links at bottom right of page: revision links to gitorious, better bug report pre-filling
Check the changelog if you are interested in the technical details behind these improvements.
This release was preceeded by a lengthy clean-up on our main webserver and a realignment of our common working platform, the code repository. So this relatively small impact on the site actually means a big step for the improvement of BeWelcome features in the future.
With the new release procedure regular updates to the source code, the core of our project, are starting to flow easily again and you can expect more bug fixes and usability improvements soon. We are also cooking up a completely rewritten version of BeWelcome based on the Drupal community framework, but more on that when it's ready for tasting.
Did you notice something on the site that's broken or very complicated to use? Let us know in the forum or even better, click "Report bug" at the bottom right of the page! Thank you for participating in the community and for helping to improve!
May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)BeWelcomeThu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/976http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/976
planetcruiserMore fixes! by planetcruiserAnother Release Monday, another announcement. We are getting some routine going here - niiice! New today:
Allowing new, not approved members (Pending status) to send messages to other users - this is actually quite a big change - see below..
Greatly improved usability of profile edit page
Fixed "mark as spam" functionality in messages - now we are notified again
Added email notification for new profile comment or update
Added number of user photos to left-hand navigation on profile page
Also there about 15 more smaller changes. See the changelog for a detailed list and all the glorious details.
A note on the possibility of new members to send messages to other members straight after they signed up: We decided to allow this, because when you are on the road and trying to contact a host that only accepts guest via BeWelcome you don't have time to wait around until your profile is approved by one of our volunteers. We hope new potential members like this improvement! We will however keep an eye on spam levels and add more spam protection mechanisms in the next releases.
Related to this I would like to mention that for the last 3 months we had a preference setting that allowed you to opt-out of messages from new members. We removed this setting again because a) it was not working properly and because b) we are planning to drop the manual reviewing of profiles in three months from now. This means new members will become full members after they confirmed their email address. We will then, like most other community websites, rely on flagging of joke or abuse profiles by our users. So we are going to "crowd-source" our review process. ;)
I think that's all for today.
Thanks to bikepunk, coroa, crumbking, jeanyves, matthias, lupochen, pablobd and steinwinde for contributing to this release.
May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)BeWelcomeThu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1040http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1040
planetcruiserPost-Easter fixes released by planetcruiserDear members,
We kept pushing more and more things into this release, changed the date a few times, but finally it is here! The most important changes:
Fixed reporting of profile comments, note the new flag button on comment pages
Added group name and link to recent forum posts list on personal start page
Changed (increased) message sending limits for new users and always allow replies to messages
See the detailed changelog for some technical background and 10 more smaller changes and developer related improvements.
Regarding reporting of comments please note that if you have reported problematic comments in the past and have not heard back from us, please report them again by clicking on the flag symbol. This time you can be sure that we receive your feedback. ;)
For the next release we have not set tasks or a focus yet, so please tell us in the comments below what you think is most important to be fixed next!
May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)BeWelcomeThu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1141http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1141
planetcruiserFixes and improvements released by planetcruiserFellow travellers and hosts,
the summer is about to start and the big BeWelcome event in Toulouse is about to happen this weekend, so our motivation is high to improve this site. Here is what we've done:
Made profile updates more intuitive by adding "Edit" links when viewing own profile
Improved map search to return more relevant results
Fixed a couple of errors when editing profile data
Showed the "Family and close friends" feature some love
Read all the background and discussion in the 10 tickets mentioned in the detailed changelog.
Also, we'd like to know your opinion on two smaller changes we've made to the profile pages:
Firstly, when viewing your own profile, you also see "Edit" links on the groups, comments and pictures boxes although you can't directly edit things on the following pages. Should we rename the link to "Manage" there, or is this clear as it is?
Secondly, the "Family and close friends" list had no limit anyway, that's why we removed the "Show more" link. This means the box currently always shows all friends, which is already a very long list for some members (bonjour du Sud de la France). Should we limit this box to 3, 5, 10 or more friends, or even let you set this in your preferences?
Please write your opinion in the comments below!
I'd like to thank crumbking and mahouni200000 for testing and contributing code to this release. Also toub is currently working on liberating us from using commercial mapping technology, more details on this once it's there.. ;)
Happy travels from Dracula land, and may non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)BeWelcomeThu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1166http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1166
planetcruiserSimplified sign up, and other fixes released by planetcruiserHello hosts and travellers,
after just 3 months since the last software release ;) we are proud to present the following improvements:
Sign up now without residence address and without volunteer approval
Sign up with names containing special characters now possible (i.e. Chinese, Turkish or Cyrillic)
Result list of map search now displaying more active users first
Fixed gallery picture upload
Improved database performance
Banned profiles not accessible any longer
Fixed translation and CSS for quick search button on personal start page
There are a few more changes and plenty of technical details in the complete changelog.
The simplified sign up is a pretty big change for improving our new user's privacy. Existing users can now remove their address data as well of course. The location (city) set via the map however remains mandatory. How else could travelling members find you otherwise? :)
Thanks to crumbking, jsfan, mahouni200000, matthias, sitarane, tobixen and toub for helping with this release by contributing code, bug reporting, commenting and testing.
Enjoy the summer, or winter if you are down-under somewhere.. May non-profit hospitality exchange prevail! :)BeWelcomeThu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMTBeWelcomehttp://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1267http://www.bewelcome.org/blog/planetcruiser/1267
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